The light came on at roughly midnight, at which time Ms. Tutunjian “said a prayer of thanks and got up quickly.” Why was she getting up when most would be going to sleep? According to New York Times reporter Raja Abdulrahim, Ms. Tutunjian “did not know how much time she had before she would be plunged back into darkness.”
This is life in Beirut at the moment. Amid an economic crisis born of government error (the redundancy of all redundancies), the electricity that powers modern living standards is intermittent. Ms. Tutunjian operates with great speed in the middle of the night because that’s when the odds of electricity access are greater. In the words of Abdulrahim, upon getting up Tutunjian “stripped the sheets off the bed – soaked with sweat from Beirut’s stifling and humid heat,” only for her to start “the first of as many loads of laundry as the electricity would allow.”
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